The Other America of ‘Stray Dog’
“Stray Dog” is a quietly extraordinary documentary about American life today. Like director Debra Granik’s last feature, the 2010 Oscar-nominated indie “Winter’s Bone,” it is set in a financially challenged rural Missouri community, and its titular character is the appropriately nicknamed Ron “Stray Dog” Hall, a biker and Vietnam veteran who is as grizzled as he is unfailingly open-hearted. When we first meet the pot-bellied sixtysomething, he’s decked out in leather, tattoos, and stars-and-stripes patches, and is smoking and sharing moonshine with his war buddies. That’s about the extent to which he and his clan conform to coastal stereotypes about the Heartland poor, a demographic this film investigates with a plainspoken generosity that mirrors its protagonist. Continue Reading →